DR.ME: multidisciplinary mavericks with sharp knives

DR.ME is a visual art and design studio based in Manchester, UK, working in both commercial and artistic projects for clients such as Mick Jagger, Tate, Ninja Tune records, Vevo or Red Bull Music Academy, among others. Their work is bold and personal and the line between commercial and artistic project is often blurred or even inexistent.DR.ME is collaborating with the International Weird Collage Show, our 14th exhibition, to be held in London on February 1st, 2018.

– Please introduce DR.ME to our readers.DR.ME is an idea of what an interesting design studio can be, perpetuated by two friends Ryan Doyle (DR) and Mark Edwards (ME). We’ve worked together now since 2010 across a super broad landscape of projects ranging from work for the music industry through to exhibition curation whilst writing books and zines and giving talks and workshops.

– How would you define your work?We’re proud to call ourselves graphic designers but at the same time we always come at our work from an artistic perspective which we’ve found gives our practice a different voice to perhaps what would be expected from a traditional graphic design studio.

– Which are your most relevant influences?There’s two answers to this, a perhaps more formal answer would be artists and designers who have influenced and inspired our practice, people like Bridget Riley, Vaughan Oliver, John Baldessari, John Stezaker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Doig. A less formal/more abstract answer would be reading new things, listening to new things, visiting exhibitions/new places, talking to new people and exposing ourselves to new experiences.

– Limits between commercial and artistic projects seem quite blurred.Is there a difference when approaching work for client and for art projects?Yes and no, they are both incredibly challenging but in different ways, for instance when we’re creating commercial work there will normally be a quite clearly defined end goal whether that is a record sleeve, a book jacket or a poster design which have – to a certain degree – quite clearly defined parameters. When making artwork however the outcome can be a lot more fluid as essentially we are the client and we are the ones trying to create something that we find deeply engaging.

– Did your way of making collage affected somehow your work process?It’s certainly made us very open to collaboration, collage is the ultimate collaboration, if you take an image of a painting by Picasso and a photo of a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and combine these with an image of ancient Egyptian scripture for example then you are creating an impossible millennium spanning collaboration!

– What´s your definition of collage?Cutting a new portal to a different dimension.

Submissions

We´re open to receive submissions of artists working with contemporary collage. We´d love to see what people are doing and share it with our community.
We are looking for fresh and daring work and will publish only that. We prefer wrong that already seen.

TWS show is not an inspiration catalogue. Inspiration comes from elsewhere. Challenges are inspiring. New things are inspiring. Forgetting what has been done and reinventing the obvious is inspiring. Music is inspiring. People making beautiful mistakes are inspiring. Glacial meetings in weird places are inspiring.

Since 2011 TWS has curated and produced collage exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe (Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Rotterdam, Trondheim, Valladolid) and America (New York, Montreal, Lima, Quito, San José de Costa Rica) and ran workshops and collage sessions in many of these cities.